Until recently Naoki Hiroshima was the owner of the rather rare Twitter handle @N and had previously been offered $50,000 for it. He regularly received password reset emails as people tried to steal it. Sadly someone has now managed to gain control of it, all thanks to a social engineering
attack against his domain registrar.

GoDaddy

The attacker gained access to Naoki's GoDaddy account, changed all of Naoki's details in order to prevent Naoki regaining access and then changed the MX record on the domain which hosted the email address connected to the Twitter account os that they could receive password reset emails.

The attacker claims that they were able to extract the last four digits of Naoki's card number from PayPal and that GoDaddy then allowed them to guess the remaining two digits, however PayPal deny that this is the case.

Thanks to an anonymous tip-off, Naoki had already changed the email address on his Twitter account to an @gmail.com address which the attacker hadn't gained access to.

After unsuccessfully trying to trick Twitter into giving them access to the account, the attacker changed tactics and got in touch with Naoki offering him his GoDaddy account and domains back in return for the @N Twitter handle.

As GoDaddy had refused to return the account and domains to their correct owner, Naoki reluctantly handed over control of the @N handle to the attacker.

Naoki is now back in control of his precious domains, but is known as @N_is_stolen on Twitter. The attacker is no longer in control of @N, but another Twitter user appears to be squatting on the handle.

GoDaddy have released a statement claiming that whilst the attacker did indeed manage to use social engineering techniques against a GoDaddy employee in order to gain some of the data required to access the account, the attacker "was already in possession of a large portion of the customer information needed to access the account at the time he contacted GoDaddy".

Don't miss:

There are many companies who have chosen to make the leap to the cloud. In fact, according to a Internet survey report more companies used cloud computing in order to improve their productivity. However, before addressing this new IT delivery model it is essential for companies to make an analysis of the main Cloud computing service providers of the market. First, companies should consider one thing before establishing any relationship, without trust it is impossible to establish a good working relationship. However, there are more aspects that need to be fixed before signing an agreement on cloud computing.

Last Friday, Julie Ann Horvath dramatically quit over allegations of harassment by leadership at GitHub over the last two years.
GitHub is a developer platform that allows users to share code. The website is based on Git, the version control software created by Linux hacker and founder, Linus Torvalds.
Until Friday, Julie was a developer at the company.

The developers at Replicant (an Open Source project aimed at replacing all proprietary components within Android OS) has discovered a remote back door in the Samsung Galaxy series of mobile devices and the Nexus S.
The backdoor is only present in the proprietary version of Android bundled with the Samsung devices.
So far, investigations reveal that the backdoor is relatively benign despite having read and write access to sensitive areas of the filesystem.

No, not gold-plated Monster cables but monster 800Gbps cables! It looks like Intel is forging ahead with it's plans to disaggregate rack server infrastructure.
Intel will be launching these new MXC cables in the later half of the year. Each cable bundles up to 64, simplex fibres to aggregate 1.6TB of bandwidth and can transmit up to 300 metres without repeaters.

Those smart folks working at Security Research in the University of Cambridge Computer Labs have developed a hardware device which promises to protect you from password leaks.
That's a big promise so does it stack up?

With over 100,000 units sold on the first day of sales and over 2 million sold by the end of 2014, the Raspberry Pi has been an incredible success.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation, set up as a charitable organisation in 2008, has a mission statement to "promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing." and despite it's success, not everyone's happy.

Getting physically connected between locations has always been expensive and time consuming due to negotiating rights of way and the actual laying of the physical cable.
Chris Smedley, CEO of Geo Networks has decided to team up with Thames Water for a quicker and more efficient way of laying fibre. The London sewerage system.

"Transaction malleability," which worried Mt. Gox and Bitstamp, strikes again.
Not only are Bitcoin trading sites like Bitstamp and Mt. Gox susceptible to the recent accleration of the "transaction malleability" problem, but apparently the Silk Road—or at least its newest incarnation—is too.
Is this the end for Bitcoin as we know it?

The shortlist of finalists for the UK Cloud Awards 2014 have been announced, the new awards organised by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), Cloud Pro and techUK. There will be 15 awards across 2 categories, projects and products. In the products category, there is a wide variety of new and established businesses from startups to major international corporations. The winners will be announced at ceremony to be held at City Hall on 26th February, 2014.

KNC Miner (a Swedish Company) are using the 'pre-order' funds they have accumulated from over 4000 orders of a $12000 BitCoin Mining device to build a 10MW datacentre in The Node Pole region, near the Arctic Circle in Sweden.

Recent revelations from more leaked Snowden files show GCHQ has been using hackers own techniques against them and DDoSing their chatrooms and even using crafted BBC articles to scrape data to help identify users.

2014 should see the ever growing web continue to expand at a rate yet again even faster than before.
More and more companies will continue to utilise the web's advantages, and with that there will come new challenges for hosting companies.